


So Why Should I Believe?

by wherethewhiled



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/F, Family Feels, Fix-It, Gen, Post-Canon, Swan-Mills Family, The Mills Family
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-10
Updated: 2018-05-12
Packaged: 2019-05-04 15:34:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14596140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wherethewhiled/pseuds/wherethewhiled
Summary: Or the one where Regina has her family and she’s happy but she’s also pining, will always be pining even if the one she loves hasn’t deserved it for quite some time.  If only her grown up son didn’t still need to believe against all odds.  Everyone learns a lesson.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Friends, listen, I cleaned it up a bit but this is emotional throw up about Regina’s feelings regarding Emma taking herself out of their lives. General season seven canon. But changes for narrative. Reason being the character’s exit last year and the show ending this year is doing dumb existential things to me. Big on the Mills family unit. Really, it’s supposed to be one of those sparse one-shots I do because I can’t handle a multi-chapter story arc but I keep making dying noises I can’t fix but can fic, so here we are.

 

_So why should I believe that everything will be alright?_

_That everything will be alright_

_If only we were free to breathe_

**_Cold War Kids_ **

 

The curse breaks and her heart breaks, too.  

Henry is thirty, and nearly six feet tall, and dashing in his burgundy leather jacket and khakis, hoisting his equally precocious girl into his arms and beaming that big impossible smile he has.  Had since he was a gap-toothed toddler.

Lucy is ten years old and her giggles are bright and triumphant and free.  Her feet delightedly kick out as she is tightly sandwiched by her parents, her left sneaker dropping to the floorboards in their hopping youthful celebrations.

Ella is the first to glance out for her.  Perceptive, sharp, and generous and unselfish with her love, she lopes desperately pushing past the high stools of the empty bar and launches into Regina, Henry following close behind, and together they hold her up as the laughter and the tears go loudly and messily, and Lucy prattles on and on about belief and magic into Regina’s curly cursed-persona hair.  Henry is as proud as can be.

He doesn’t bring up his own exploits at that same age although Regina can see the memories in his bobbing throat, and she’s not as relieved as she is mournful about the omission.  But his tenor has a baseline, and he’s grown and he’s made his choices, as has she.  Regina couldn’t ask for more.

Her brash unpredictable sister even bursts through the front door declaring “Finally!” before rushing into Regina’s beckoning arm.  Her wild red hair gets caught in all her fingers and the feeling chokes Regina up, reminding her of someone else’s irrepressible hair, reminding her of everything that is still missing from this reunion.

Lucy calls out “Grandma!  Grandma!” for the first time in years then and the startled, faintly horrified look on Regina’s face as her head spins to her granddaughter has everyone in stitches.  Regina palms her endearing chipmunk cheeks, taking in a shaky breath, deliriously, alarmingly, unbearably happy and unable to speak she’s so grateful for her baffling, effusive family of story book misfits, resplendent in their togetherness –

– and Emma Swan misses it all.

 

–

 

Four inseparable, carefree days of staying up, sleeping in, and spending time, and her son once again changes everything on her.

He and Regina are putting The Game of Life back into its box and setting up the Risk board on the coffee table of Ella’s cozy two bedroom.  Mom and daughter are debating popcorn mix-ins in the kitchen.  Raucously nixing any combinations that don’t include Reese’s Pieces, her sister pops the kernels on the stovetop and laughs at the impressive, bouncing, bargaining pleas Lucy is making for the cinnamon sugar glaze Zelena had cooked up the night before.  Behind the couch, Rogers is pouring drinks at the round dining table, trying to drown out the sweet nothings between Alice and Robin, spluttering for them to help him out while they tease him with exaggerated smooching noises.

“Okay, so, this might sound crazy,” Henry says, blue and pink people pegs plinking into the Life box, “but I think you and I need to go back for Ma.”

Regina’s fingers close over the Risk pieces in her palm.  The mention of Emma is like an electric back surge, shorting her out.  Paralyzed, she focuses on the poking ache of the miniature plastic troops to bring herself back to the present and into the humming cluttered home of her loved ones.

Henry’s steady hands reach for her.  Patiently, he places one on Regina’s far shoulder and the other on her upturned wrist, wavering in midair.  “She’s the thing that’s missing here.”

“Henry that’s …” her shuddering breath gives out, the sounds dropping into nothingness.  In the kitchen the exploding kernels pick up in tempo inside the pot.  Patting his knuckles to let go she opens her hand full of red pieces and tells him, “It’s not possible, it’s long gone.”

“If you believe, Mom, anything is possible.  Remember?”

“I can’t do that, she’s made her choice,” Regina scoffs, plunking a heap of mixed pieces into his hand and moving on to doling out horses around the board, “Besides, what am I supposed to do, turn up on her porch and what exactly, tell her I think we were meant to be in love?  I mean, really.”

Henry laughs, “Yes, yeah!  I think you gotta say it out loud.  Once.  Take that chance and tell her, one time, Mom.  Come on.”

Regina sighs.  “I know you think it’s the perfect story but life doesn’t follow those narrative rules of yours.  Even ours.”

“Well, then maybe I’m saying it’s time we broke the rules and get her back in our lives.”  He fiddles with a remaining blue horse between his fingers, staring at her for a response that she isn’t giving, as if he expected her to leap at the suggestion.  “I really tried not to miss her.  Don’t you miss her?”

One by one, she lines up the red cannons in front of herself and her son, and changes the topic of conversation.  “I was thinking I could take Lucy out tomorrow with the girls and your aunt to the pier.  See the market, the aquarium.  Ride the ferris wheel.  You two haven’t had any time alone, you know.”

He snorts, tossing the blue horse in its corresponding pile, bobbing his head like he’s impressed.  “Mom, that’s embarrassing.”

“Not any more embarrassing than you running into me going home the morning after, freezing my ass off and congratulating me.”

“I forgot about that,” he says, tilting his head at her and giving his best lopsided grin.  The reminders in the planes of his face are the most torturous.  Smiling past it Regina thumbs at his dimples.  But he’s on to her and in his eyes she sees her little prince again, soft and unsure.  “You’re not still seeing him, are you?”

“No, darling, I’m not,” she says, pinching that strong signature nose that he’s grown so handsomely into, then reaches for the dice and cards.  “Sort out the rest of the pieces, will you?”

 

–

 

Rogers, as designated driver, takes her sister and their girls home to the loft above Roni’s where there’s a queen-sized bed and an L-shaped leather sectional to crash on.  Regina helps Henry set up the couch at Ella’s, pinching the other end of the plaid sheet and floating it out to tuck under the cushions.  

“Does this mean we’re staying in Seattle?” he asks, his bright mind always ticking, filled with the kinds of questions that always seem to end up challenging her own curious mind, too.  It’s how they helped nourish and kept each other flourishing, rich in spirit and thought, living in that sleepy dampened town under her original curse.  It’s also why her lying to squelch his imagination and investigation into the truth was such a betrayal.  Beyond making him feel crazy for believing in all the things he could already see, her son had needed her to make sense of his world as it was, as she had countless times before, and she had shut him out.  Denied who he was, and who she was to him.  

His shining example.

Regina straightens and tucks a thick, highlighted curl behind her ear.  “Is that what you want?  Have you asked Ella?”

Henry chuckles.  “She asked if I’d asked you.”

“Pass me that?”

He lobs her the pillow case.  “So, what are you thinking?  Soon as Lucy finishes out her year, technically, we could go anywhere.  Or we could stick around with everyone else.  Though, they’ve never seen Storybrooke, you know?  Lucy and Ella.  Might be pretty cool to show them where we came from.  I mean, the place is like a bit of both.  Magic and fairy tales, but all the goodies of real life like heating and plumbing, and the internet.”

“Sweetheart, when did you become such a rambler,” she quibbles, and deposits herself on the couch, plain exhausted by his angling in neurotic degrees, “Because you most certainly didn’t learn it from me.”

He throws his hands up.  “I know right?  It’s – it’s the writing, and the curse, and the – I can’t stop.  Oh Mom, help me stop,” he dryly pleads and plops down beside her, too tall and grown for her to pull him in to snuggle against her side.  But (and she’s smiling) trust her boy to drape his heavy tree trunk of an arm around her shoulders and pull her closer to him.

Ella is tucking Lucy in, and the apartment is dim and quiet and she’s had a couple whiskey sours, and they are healthy and back in the land of real living, and it’s the closest to at peace Regina has ever felt in her long extended life.  If not for the painful longing behind her lungs.  Gently, she drops her head back onto her son’s shoulder.  “Declaring my undying love to break up her marriage isn’t rescuing her, Henry Mills.  Get that out of your head.”

He heaves a giant dramatic breath.  “Would it be wrong if I said I wished it was?”

Inhaling, she tugs open the knotted silk scarf at her throat.  Exhaling, she chides, “I was afraid you’d say that.”

Still, at eighteen minutes to midnight, dressed in a borrowed pyjama set, climbing into Lucy’s single bed and finding the book stashed under the pillows, Regina can’t help but pore over the later chapters, her fingertips sliding down the pages describing those demanding years she had lived in hopeless love with her son’s other mother, tripping over herself trying to give her the world and hiding it under her nose the whole time.

It’s been her habit since he could yell her name to leave her bedroom door slightly open most nights in case her son should need her, and then, in her cursed persona for the feeling that she had someone she was waiting on to come home to her.  But, the knocking scares the living daylights out of her and Regina barely manages to slap the book shut before his head pokes in.

“Hey, Mom?” he says, his eyes pinched tight for effect.

Regina rolls hers, mouth pulling into a flat smile.  “You can open your eyes.”

He grins, proud and sheepish at the same time.  “I was thinking and I had something I wanted to tell you.  Before the moment kind of passes,” he says, stepping into the room.

Regina’s hand presses down to sink the paperback deeper into the blanket against her lap.  “Oh?”  Her brows shoot up causing her reading glasses to slide down her nose and she hastily removes them realizing they have absolutely given her away from his expression.  

But also, frankly, so Regina can see him better, for the gallant young father he’s become.  

Henry drops onto the lilac bedspread and glances at the book and her nervous hands.  The apple tree on the pared down cover peaks between her fingers.  “Did you need me to read you a bedtime story?” he quips, smiling, breaking the tension.

Regina gives him a soft glare, feeling a little embarrassed and more than a bit ridiculous in the reverse here, posture stiff inside the peppiest room she’s ever known, sitting up in bed opposite her towering adult son.  Her granddaughter’s lively artwork is pinned all around the room.  The open closet is filled with colored pants and expressive shirts, and the dressers covered with stacks of comics – and if she specifically misses those years of having her small monkey-faced boy in her arms, that particular incarnation of him, who could blame her.  “This bed isn’t big enough for you to climb into so you better start telling me what you actually mean to, so I can get some sleep, young man.”

Henry faintly laughs out his nose, bringing an emotional gleam to his eyes as he looks her straight on and reveals his heart to her.  “The book, the ending, it’s not what I would’ve –” he gulps, and Regina stops breathing, desperate to not interrupt him.  “It was the curse, it prevented me from telling it any other way but it’s not the perfect story, Mom.  It’s the only story that makes sense.  Because I know it isn’t one-sided, it couldn't have been.”

The past that she has struggled so much to repress wheezes out of her, and in her throat a glimmer of hope lodges.  It’s stupid, and she shouldn’t, but his impassioned face gives her the courage to dare.  “Do you really think so?”

“Emma had feelings for you, too.”

Her cautious smile trembles in the radiance of his belief.  “Get down here,” she croaks.  Grinning, he bends his head.  Cupping his face Regina plants a kiss in his tidy hair, and sharing a look of purpose then, they put their foreheads together and breathe the yearning into existence.


	2. Chapter 2

The creation of Storybrooke provided its original citizens legal identities and this curse in producing the neighbourhood of Hyperion Heights has uniquely left her with a second, including a business in that name.  It’s not thriving, but it’s a dependable source of income and belongs to her, and looking into merging her assets, turns into the perfect headache to distract herself over for the month it takes to reach the end of the school year.

Here and there, in small doses, the anticipation bourgeons.  Regina is terrified of nourishing such a bad idea but replaces a portion of her closet, spends too much on prettier undergarments, and begins to straighten her hair again.  Exactly ten days before Lucy’s last exam.  

Her parents take her out to a taqueria by the waterfront once she’s let out to celebrate and tell her the plan, and at a half past one she’s shouting out “Grandma!” right across the bar and barrels into Regina so hard, in the tightest, most ecstatic hug, it knocks all her repressed feelings loose in one breath and brings tears to her eyes, the rush of it leaving her dizzy, even.

“I’m so happy!” Lucy squeals.

Ella giggles, delighted and perhaps relieved, Regina thinks, that she’s looking touched and for the most part not panic-stricken at her granddaughter’s high expectations.  “Lucy didn’t even want to ride the ferris wheel.  The minute we told her, said we had to come straight here to sort out the details of our operation.”  

Her son chuckles.  “Got her priorities straight, right Luce?”

Hands still grasping at Regina’s cardigan, she twists toward her parents and announces, “I am a Mills, aren’t I?”

That she is.  Hearing it like that, the pride to it, her reservations are nothing compared to her granddaughter and her right to her legacy, she realizes.  The town, the operations, and the stories.  

Or, at least, it’s the right excuse to focus on.  The right reasons to go home again to the lifelong dream she had ripped into existence.  

Regina hunches to her level and tips her chin up with a finger.  “Remember before the curse broke, I said not to call me grandma in front of my customers?  Because it confuses them.”  Lucy nods.  Leaning in then, smiling and matching the brilliant shine in her umber eyes, full of meaning, she tells her, “I want you to call me grandma as loudly and proudly as you like the minute we leave for Storybrooke.  I want everyone in town to know.  We won’t have to hide who we really are.”

The detailed plan is to spend the summer in town and decide if it’s the right, permanent move for them.  More than that, Regina rules it best not to plot it out as if true love can be schemed and made to happen.  Elbows up along the breakfast bar of her upstairs apartment, both Henry and Lucy tactfully chime in with their own laundry list of examples to back up their claim that opportunities should be created and to leave it up to them.  Ella brings them back down to earth for her.

Regina reminds them there’s a child involved.  “Your brother, or sister.”

“Right, right,” Henry says, building up to something mischievous, “but I mean, really, are we sure you didn’t magically conceive the kid with Ma?”

For that, flashing hot, mortified and speechless, Regina puts down the cinnamon and staring at him pours his fresh, piping hot cocoa and whiskey from a showy height down the drain.

“That’s fair, I deserved that,” he pouts and chortles.  Perhaps she smirks, perhaps she doesn’t.  Perhaps she gives a long-suffering sigh as she does.  

Regardless, the thought is the last thing she needs going into this (as lewd, consoling, and tragic as it is). 

The weekend after July the fourth, the four of the them pile into Henry’s car and Regina shakes as she pops in her seat belt.  Right on cue, he starts his playlist.  _Runnin’ Down a Dream_  strums out, and she swallows hard as the morning sun splashes romantic pinks and reds across the skies.

“Ready, Mom?”

“No,” she says, on principle.

The car idles.  The rhythm is upbeat and clashes.  He tilts in her direction.  “… Can I take my foot off the brake?”

“If all the songs on this playlist is themed to be about cars I’m making you drive in silence.”

“Oh, I made sure it isn’t,” Ella provides.

 

–

 

It’s a 48 hour drive, and on the long stretches Henry and her take turns telling stories about the town and it’s colorful inhabitants.  Everyone, including Lucy, is careful to sidestep mentions of Emma and that person of hers.  But under the stars on the I-90 along Lake Erie, she hears the name out of her son’s mouth and stiffens.

Regina is supposed to be sleeping, and she thinks perhaps she did sleep for an hour or so.  Her arms are square across her stomach, and her face is turned out enough toward her passenger side window she can feel the chill off the glass.  Henry’s soft zip-up is draped over her front because he can’t sleep without something on him, and secretly she’s the same, even if she’s always pretended otherwise to give up anything she could to drape over him.

Ella’s taken over at the wheel and murmurs in awe at his rendition of some inane sacrifice of theirs.  

But then, tuning her ears in, Regina learns he isn’t reminiscing about the big, impossible choices.  He’s recounting the smallest nothings like her shoving a bear claw into Emma’s yawning mouth – and in the thick of other things scratching the itches on her hard to reach places – and (how could she forget) the little surprise cupcake in the middle of main street one clouded evening, burning blue star and all because Regina deserved a wish, she had mumbled and grinned like it was the stupidest thing in the world but it wasn’t.  It really wasn’t.  It wasn’t even the stupidest one of a million reasons she had fallen in love with Emma Swan.

“I’m afraid of getting her hopes up, Henry.”

Sounding exhausted and blissed out on the memories, he replies, “I told Lucy we’d be lowkey about it, I promise.”

“I’m talking about Mom.”

Regina opens her eyes to the reflection of her own pinched face faded against the black pines and a spattering of splendid stars, like freckles across her cheeks.

Emma gets freckles in the summer.

 

–

 

Their first stop is the manor.  Henry unloads their bags and Regina open all the rooms to the gushing fresh air and together they introduce the chatty, wide-eyed half of their family to the place they still call home.

“Can I  _please_ stay here?” Lucy implores, her clasped hands tucked beneath her chin.

“Of course you can,” Regina indulges, and her granddaughter is off poking in all the nooks and crannies of her son’s old room.  

“Hang on – hold up, let me PG thirteen the place first!”

“Oh, Henry Mills.  Do I even really want to know?” Ella pokes fun, is sharp-minded even as she’s got this big grin on, enamoured of him.

“Not like that,” he laughs, throwing her that fond glower he perfected mimicking his mother growing up, and chomping on his lip then, her precious son – he looks as if he’s bursting to break open like piggy banks all his childhood secrets to her, his wife, his love of his life and if it isn’t something to behold.  Regina misses it.  That kind of … something.  “Come on.  I’ll have you know, these are highly sought after graphic novels.  Not appropriate for ten-year-olds, but ogh, brilliant.”

“Please, who are you talking to,” Ella says, her steps loose and buoyant into the room.  “I’ve been looking for that one!”

It’s official.  The Mills are nerds.  Lips parted, full of a ticklish affection, Regina lets out a tumbling breath and it’s going to be fine.  Not having a partner is lonesome at times.  However tightly knit her family is, there are things she needs, these daily, ordinary things that she cannot expect of them, and these inside-out things that she cannot share with them.  But she’s had happiness and she’s had forgiveness and grace.  Pining like she is, it’s not that important in the grand scheme.  It’s not a big deal if her declaring should come to nothing.  It’s going to be fine.

Only she starts losing her nerve while uncovering the furniture and has to flee to the kitchen to stand in the breeze, then.  

“Mom?”

Her eyes gloss over her relatively trimmed backyard through the windows above the sink and she notes the Charmings have tended to her property as sworn.  

“We don’t have to do this.  We don’t have to see them.  We can turn around and be outta here in a second.”    

Regina turns to him, standing at the diagonal end of the island, putting on a brave face.  Ella and Lucy hover in the doorway, giving her space, smiling and concerned and supportive.

“Have you changed your mind?” he asks, tentatively, like he’s crossing his fingers she hasn’t.  Because he’s that set on his parents ending up together as if he isn’t thirty and himself the beloved parent of a daughter he met at two years old.

If she wanted they would happily leave, she knows.  Exuberantly turn this into a family road trip down the eastern seaboard.  End up in New York.  Regina could avoid this for the rest of her life.  Or be brave.  Like the three astounding faces before her.  Proud of her for even coming here.

“No, let’s stick to the schedule,” she says, thankful not a one of them believes in leaving some things to chance.  Then rolls her eyes.  “Before the entire town knows we’re here.”

Henry splits open beaming and it helps, his happiness helps.  Makes up for the no-good doubts and the pitiful hope that’s burning a hole in her stomach.  “Okay everyone, you heard her.  Let’s change.”

 

–

 

Regina goes for a simple, sleeveless dress in an oyster grey linen and a printed silk scarf from her current life.

The house is as blue and gothic as she remembers.

“Take the coat off, Mom,” he stage whispers from the driver’s side.

“Hush,” she hisses, irked and maybe swatting her hand behind her just as dramatically for him to tone it down.  But then standing on the curb in the galling sun, out to get her, she shucks off her matching indigo coat and shoves it through the open passenger window at her son.  

Their son.

It’s as simple and unavoidable as that.  Greet her then ask her to Granny’s with her family for an early dinner, a reunion.  Point to them, the son and daughter and granddaughter she’s missed out on for the last five years minus half those years for time moving in mismatched realms plus two frozen years under the curse, and it’ll be persuasive and simple and casual and it’ll be fine.

It’s possible she isn’t home.  The Bug isn’t in front of the house.  It’s possible her knock is too hard, bordering on belligerent, and it’s possible, hands twisting, she’s going to break a couple fingers she’s that nervous.

Opening, her future in front of her opening, the smell of pie crust and dried herbs is first to escape the house, and then it’s Her and that dipping mouth, and last the gurgling fusses of a child, and life isn’t fair or a perfect circle.  No, it’s incoherent and it moves, and it smells like – pie, chicken pot pie and –

– not the person she remembers.

Her heart leaps and stops the thin gasp in, and in that eternal second something dies, and her anticipation sighs out as her lungs deflate and she up and scolds herself for being so naive.

For the longest time, nothing passes between them.  Then, she says, “Hi,” and none of it makes sense.  Emma’s golden hair is faded, pale and tucked into a bun, the braids about to fall apart on her and in those harried arms a toddler, perhaps one year old, kicks and squirms.  Regina’s eyes rake down the polychromatic embroidery, to the baggy denim rolled up at the ankles, to the painted toes twitching to curl into the floor.  Mouth agape, she has no response.

Noticing the unfamiliar vehicle on the street, Emma leans out to investigate past Regina’s shoulder and blanches, the embarrassed flush draining from her face.  Her panicked look, at least, hasn’t changed and flipping the toddler to her other hip she gulps and frowns and not a single thing is fine.  “I’m making dinner and um, she’s teething and he’s coming home so, I should go,” she says.

Regina feels the silk knot she had tied – twice for it to lay daintily – pressing into her throat and is too numb to stop the door closing on her until it’s too late.  Pathetically, she places her fingertips on the panelled glass then and she can’t move, she doesn’t know how to move on from that interaction, if it could even be called one.  In the days leading up to this she had imagined the child to be three, four years old and blonde like her mother, but this toddler has shoots of black hair and must be a second –  _oh!_  and she had designs on breaking up a family for her own selfish desires – and Emma, she had looked drained and awkward, and perhaps something like disappointed in Regina for popping up unannounced like this.  

The gentle, careful hand at her shoulder startles her and it’s Ella, and she says, “Let’s eat.  You must be hungry,” and Regina is and she’s faint, and the hand drops to her hip to guide her down the path and her head has gone to drown.

 

–

 

Ruby is thrilled to see them, getting up out of her seat and uttering, “Oh, my god,” before she’s even spun to catch them bustling into Granny’s like she can still sniff them out between the grease of the diner and the trees and the gasoline of the town.  The hugs are genuine but brief as she clues in on the something serious and the introductions are hushed as she ushers them to the table – their old favourite – in the front corner and shoots the dwarves a look to back off.

The mood is heavy and somber as they order and it isn’t cold but the air-conditioning is uncomfortable on her skin, the contrast of it.  Her coat is hanging off the tips of her shoulders and Regina tugs and holds the edges further over her bare arms, and if it’s perhaps a sad-looking miserable protective gesture then so be it because her heart is shot and defenseless.  “No, darling, it’s not all right, but I don’t have a right to pry,” she says, eventually, in response to him struggling to reconcile the changes he’d glimpsed of his other mother, changes that have been ongoing since before her engagement, if they’re honest.  It shouldn’t have come as such a surprise.  

“Not to mention it could have the opposite effect,” Ella adds.

Regina looks up thinking of the catastrophe that would be.  Dismissed is one thing but to be despised for getting between them?  “Regardless, it’s not my place.”

“Pfft.  Technically, I mean –” He isn’t liking her standing on the outside of this.  Being pushed out.  Recast as the interloper.  Henry huffs.  “Okay, but I do, don’t I?  I have a right or a place.  That’s not Ma.”

“It is,” Regina sighs, “It’s who she’s chosen to be.”

Their drinks arrive.  Next to her pot of green tea is a shot of whiskey and she gives Ruby a grateful look then dumps it in.  The first sip is stronger than she expected and she frowns, pinching her eyes shut as she loses control of her emotions.

Her son’s chatter slows, and dies, then.

“Henry, I know you love me,” Regina says, her unhappiness breaking her voice, blurring her eyes, “and that’s enough.  It really is.  More than enough.  Do you hear me?  Enough.”  The last one gusts out firm and pleading and she’s surrendering before she’s even had a chance.  Because she can’t be poking holes in Emma’s choices.  Picking apart the home she’s built.  

Regina won’t do that.  How could she?

Quietly, in the chair next to her, Lucy at last pipes up, “But if you love her,” a little desperate, a lot empathetic, her child’s hand full of hope and belief plopping on top of Regina’s knuckles, softening them, “don’t give up, Grandma.  Maybe she needs you.  To help her remember.”

Regina does everything she can to pull her mouth into a smile for her, the effort of it spilling a tear down over the round of her cheek.  Primly, she brushes it off then layers that hand over Lucy’s to console her.  Doesn’t want to scare her.  “It’s all right.  I have all of you, don’t I?  I’m happy, I am.  Giving her up, isn’t giving up.” 

“Grandma, you haven’t even tried!”

Barely holding it together, Regina peeks up through her lashes for the grown-ups across the table.

But even Ella is moved.  “Lucy has a point,” she says, curly ponytail swishing, a shoulder hitching, “Give yourself a chance, but also, maybe, give her a chance.”

Pitching over his mug of coffee, thumbs hooking over its rim, Henry goes catching her teary, wobbly eyes.  “Forget about me for a second, Mom.  The four of us, I have everything I need.”  Their eyes connect, and hold.  “This is extra.  Okay?  But listen to your heart and do what it’s telling you to do.  I know you know her better than anyone.  Do it for the two of you.”

“Emma doesn’t deserve that.”

“Deserve what?  Love?”

“Someone putting something like this on her.”  Regina blows out a breath.  “Something she didn’t ask for.”

“How do you know?”  Lucy blinks up at her, genuine and attentive, pouring this unconditional faith into her – How is she to measure up? – and Regina could bury her foolish self for days under the covers.

To hope against hope hurts.  If she could stamp it out and move on –  “I suppose, I don’t.”

“Then you need to tell her so she can decide.  Because if you don’t say it out loud she’ll never really know.  What if that’s all it really takes to find your true love?  Grandma, you have to tell her.”


End file.
